Girl 6 Review

An actress is humiliated at an audition, so to pay the bills becomes a phone sex worker. Soon she starts getting into her various personae, and then begins to lose her identity.

by Angie Errigo |
Published on
Release Date:

07 Jun 1996

Running Time:

108 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

Girl 6

The eponymous Girl 6 is a confused young woman whose bizarre search for identity apparently represents Spike Lee's idea of a comic exploration of a contemporary woman's world. However, the ensuing events, at best uneasily comic, at worst borderline tasteless, suggest that the director is every bit as bewildered as his heroine.

The attractive Randle stars as an aspiring actress whose real name is only revealed at the end of the film, so objectified is she. She auditions for an obnoxious film director called "QT" (no prizes for guessing who), and departs outraged after he has checked out her breasts. She feels humiliated, but promptly seeks employment selling phone sex, which might be considered at least as degrading. Designated Girl 6 at the techno-brothel, she really gets into her fantasy personae: sex-starved Housewife, wholesome Lovely Brown and bondage bitch April, as the job treads an increasingly fine line between acting and prostitution. More worryingly, she gets a bang out of her kinky clientele of anonymous groaners, becoming emotionally attached to one and frighteningly stalked by another.

However, none of this brings us any closer to who she really is or what she really wants. From time to time her concerned neighbour Jimmy (Lee) and still smitten ex-husband (Washington) try to figure her out, but are no more successful than she is or we are. Meanwhile, a lot of faces flit through in scattershot vignettes (Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Halle Berry, John Turturro) to the accompaniment of a Prince soundtrack.

Vintage Lee visual flourishes and a couple of chucklesome fantasies spoofing a 70s sitcom and blaxploitation flicks make this more watchable than the infuriatingly pointless content warrants. Men are likely to laugh a lot to conceal their arousal. Women without an identity crisis and not into entertaining creepy strangers will find this more embarrassing than funny.
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